Monday, October 12, 2009

Current Build Status

Ok, so after my long delay in progress I'm getting working again and things are moving right along. I'm actually pretty surprised at how fast things are going at the moment, but with the hull and racks mostly completed, much of the rest is the small detail work which is fairly easy In the last week I have in installed the compression struts to the mast post and am currently working on the rigging. The components of the rig are as follows:
  • Mast Base
  • Boom
  • Spreaders
  • Shrouds
Having completely blank tubes from which to build all of this stuff has given me a lot of freedom about how to put it all together. Lets start with the mast base. This part is pretty easy. Its two chunks of delrin that are cut to fit in the mast post and the bottom of the mast with a cut-off bolt head to act as a pin. The hardest part about this was finding the delrin, which I ended up getting off of E-bay. I will have the delrin lathed to fit the two end.

Boom - pretty easy really. Just cut the end of the boom to fit around the mast and then attach it with a bolt. I also have the hardware pieces for the vang and outhaul on order.

Spreaders - I spent some time with some scale drawings trying to figure out the perfect geometry for the spreaders. I think I'm pretty close, but I'm going to build a set of test spreaders that will have a variable geometry so that I can test them a bit before I build the real set.

The mast attachments will be made of solid carbon and are pretty close to being ready to put on the mast. Once these few things are done I should be ready to put the rig up and start testing it out. Once I get everything how I like it there will be some finish work to do, but I have all winter to do that.

2 comments:

derek said...

Yea for progress!

Yea for moths!

Yea for ... well ... a forward motion.

Kirk said...

On my boom ( from AUS)there are a couple of layers of CF reinforcement added to the end that is cut out for the mast....you may want to do the same.

For the foils, teknologika (blog) has some good pointers on building them.